Australasia
There are 11 different forest types in Australasia, distributed as shown in Map 1. The main body of the Australian continent is very dry and covered with desert and desert bush, as indicated by the location of the ecological zones in Map 2. Much of the existing forest, which surrounds the central very dry area, is covered with scattered trees, which have been assigned the categories sparse trees and parkland (tropical and non-tropical) in the classification system used for this study. Most of the denser forests are also dry, being either deciduous or sclerophyllous (Map 1). Mangroves occur along the northern coastline and other tropical moist forests occur near the east coast of the Cape York peninsula of northern Queensland. Non-tropical evergreen broadleaf forests occur in Tasmania, and all of the forest in New Zealand is also in this category.
There are 20 ecological zones in Australasia, all of which have some forest cover (Map 2). The ecological zone system of Holdridge was used for this region, and the map shows the blocky effect caused by the low resolution of the digital version of this work. One of the effects of this on the analysis was that a forest area figure was generated that was not included in any ecological zone (note the white bits around the coasts of the islands, particularly New Zealand, that were not covered by the digital version of the Holdridge system). The hotter and drier ecological zones were mainly found in the Australian continent and New Caledonia, the wetter and colder zones were confined to the south eastern area of Australia, Tasmania, New Zealand and Fiji. The coldest zones were found only in New Zealand, e.g., polar desert, polar rain tundra.
The forest area totals (Table 1, Fig. 2) show that Australia had by far the greatest amount of forest cover of any country in the region. However, with nearly one and a half million km² of forest compared to New Zealand's 42 thousand-odd km², Australia has only 7.5% of its forests protected, compared to 44% in New Zealand. The forests in Fiji and New Caledonia had even lower percentage protection figures (Fig.2).
The sparse trees and parkland that were seen to include most of the forest cover in Map 1 show up very significantly in Fig. 1. The percent protected of each of these was quite low, 5.5% for tropical areas, 6.9% for non-tropical areas. Of the 14 forest types in the region, non-tropical broadleaf evergreen forest had the highest percentage protected at an overall 42%, being well protected in both Australia and New Zealand (from Table 2). Three forest types in the region had 0% protected: the freshwater swamp forests of New Caledonia, the semi-evergreen moist broadleaf forests of Fiji and the deciduous/semi-deciduous forests of Australia. These forest types were confined to these countries in the region, so their lack of protection in these countries meant that they had no protection at all in the region. The forests of New Zealand were confined to one type: evergreen broadleaf, which was absent from elsewhere except Tasmania, but had a high percentage under protection in both.
Table 3 shows that most forest types occurred in a number of different ecological zones. The significance of this for conservation is that one forest type that exists in, for example, five different ecological zones, has five possible variants that should be considered individually for their conservation value and protection needs. In the case of Australasia, in addition to most forest types being distributed among a number of different zones, there were some that were confined to only one or two. Among these were two of the three forest types noted above for having no protection: freshwater swamp forest and semi-evergreen moist broadleaf forest. The latter occurred in two different ecological zones, which indicates that there may be two variants of this forest type. The third of the forest types without protection (see above) was deciduous/semi-deciduous forest, which was distributed among four different zones. This indicated the possibility of there being four variants of this forest type in Australia which had no protection. Upper montane forest (a tropical forest category), confined to Australia, was only 2.6% protected (Table 2). This forest type occurred in two zones, and all the protected forests were in one of these, so the variant in the subtropical wet forest zone was unprotected (Table 3). The non-tropical deciduous broadleaf forest type was found to be in a similar state: it was also confined to Australia (Table 2), and was unprotected in the subtropical thorn steppe zone (Table 3). There was very little of the evergreen needleleaf forest under protection (2.9%, Fig. 1), and of the six different ecological zones that it occurred in only three had any of this forest protected. In particular this forest in the cool temperate moist forest zone should be examined for protection, because there is a very sizeable amount of it there (1301 km²).
In an attempt to impartially indicate natural, undisturbed forest variants which may be under the most immediate threat of destruction, a list was drawn up that pinpointed those under 100 km2 in extent with none protected. These are variants of relatively limited extent and which do not even have any legal protection; possibly much less actual protection. Some of these forest variants may indeed be truly rare and unprotected types, others are clearly fragments of forest at the end of their ranges, as for example certain types of dry forest should not normally occur in moist ecological zones, or vice versa. An in-depth analysis of these forest variants is outside the scope of this study. There were 3 of the 72 variants in Australasia that met these criteria, and these are listed below (T=tropical forest type, N=non-tropical forest type):
Forests in the boreal and polar ecological zones in New Zealand had very high percentages under protection (Fig. 3 and Map 2, 47-89%). The two highest percentages in the region as a whole were for the polar desert (89%) and the warm temperate desert bush (72%). However the forest cover was very small in both of these zones (46 km² and 327 km² respectively). Table 4, shows that only 2% of the polar desert zone was forested, and the amount of forest in the warm temperate desert bush was so small that it was less than 0.5% of the zone. In four zones the forests were less than 1% protected: cool temperate steppe, subtropical desert, subtropical thorn steppe and tropical thorn steppe (Fig. 3). There was a total of nine zones where the forests had less than 10% protection.
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